58, HISTORY OF CASHMIR. 



rior wealth : the mine was accordingly wrought, and in the course of his 

 reign the king coined 100 crore of Dinars* less one, challenging all the 

 princes of the world to exceed this coinage, and complete the 100 crore. 



The taste for wealth acquired by the king, became fatal to his subjects : 

 to accumulate treasure he levied heavy exactions on all ranks of people, 

 and particularly oppressed the brahmans, by resuming the endowments, 

 which he or his predecessors had bestowed upon them : their complaints 

 and remonstrances were unavailing with the king and his ministers, Siva 

 Dasa and others, a set of Cdyasfhas, incapable of any generous feelings, 

 whose extortion drove a hundred brahmans of Tulamula to drown them- 

 selves in the Chandrabhagd : to the supplications of the sacredotal order, the 

 king shewing entire indifference, he at last attracted their menaces : these 

 he ridiculed, but was finally punished for his impiety : in consequence of 

 a curse denounced upon him by one of the order, he met with an acciden- 

 tal fall; a wound ensued in one of his legs, and this breeding a number of 

 worms, which preyed upon the king's body, he died in the greatest agony, 

 after a reign of thirty-one years. f LalitapIra, who succeeded Jayapira 

 was his son, by Durgd Devi / he was a dissolute prince, who lavished his fa^ 



* These were copper Dinars it is to be supposed. 



•f The fate of this prince, as told with great exultation in the original, is a curious specimen of 

 Brahminical arrogance and superstition : it is not without a parallel however in the writers of Europe, 

 during the ascendancy of monkish authority ; the conversation between the prince and priests, narrated 

 in a somewhat dramatic form, is not without spirit : we may easily put it into dialogue. 



A Brahman. Menu, Mandhata, Rama, and other sovereigns, mighty as they were, treated with 

 reverence and awe the Brahmanical order, whose resistless wrath consumes earth and its mountains, 

 hell and its serpent brood, and even Swerga and its gods, and king. 



The King. Here's a big mouth, that fed upon a beggar's crumbs, and drunk with pride, talks of its 

 power with all the confidence of a holy seer. 



Ittila, a Brahman. The revolutions of time have worked some change, but it is by submitting to a 

 master, that we have ceased to be Rishis. 



The King. Who art thou? Viswamitra perhaps, or Vasisht'ha, or Agastya? I crave your pardon. 



Ittila. And thou — thou art Harischandra, Trisancu or Nahusha; if so, I am Viswamitra, or 

 who I please. 



The King. By the anger of Viswamitra, Harischandra was destroyed: what am I to dread from 

 yo.rjr mighty indignation.. ■ - 



